Becoming a Woman Through Romance

Becoming a Woman Through Romance PDF Author: Linda K. Christian-Smith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Using approaches from feminism and cultural studies, this work explores the contradictory role that popular culture plays in the construction of gender, class, race, age, and sexual meanings. Christian-Smith dissects the conservative political themes underlying thirty-four teen romance novels, demonstrating how their flowery versions of romance and femininity actually inscribe white middle class gender ideology and class tensions.

Becoming a Woman Through Romance

Becoming a Woman Through Romance PDF Author: Linda K. Christian-Smith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Using approaches from feminism and cultural studies, this work explores the contradictory role that popular culture plays in the construction of gender, class, race, age, and sexual meanings. Christian-Smith dissects the conservative political themes underlying thirty-four teen romance novels, demonstrating how their flowery versions of romance and femininity actually inscribe white middle class gender ideology and class tensions.

Becoming a Woman Through Romance

Becoming a Woman Through Romance PDF Author: Linda K. Christian-Smith
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000639126
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
A woman is incomplete without a man, motherhood is a woman’s destiny, and a woman’s place is in the home. These conservative political themes are woven throughout teen romance fiction’s sagas of hearts and flowers. Using the theory and interpretive methods of feminism and cultural studies, Christian-Smith explores the contradictory role that popular culture plays in constructing gender, class, race, age and sexual meanings. Originally published in 1990, Becoming a Woman through Romance combines close textual analyses of thirty-four teen romance novels (written in the United States from 1942-1982) with a school study in three midwestern American schools. Christian-Smith situates teen romance fiction within the rapidly changing publishing industry and the important political and economic changes in the United States surrounding the rise of the New Right. By analysing the structure of the novels in terms of the themes of romance, sexuality and beautification, and the Good/Bad and Strong/Weak dichotomies, she demonstrates how each has shaped the novels’ versions of femininity over forty years. She also shows that although romance fiction is presented as a universal model, it is actually an expression of white middle class gender ideology and tension within this class. This high readable, comprehensive and coherent work was the first to combine in one volume three vital areas of cultural studies research: the political economy of publishing, textual analysis, and a study of readers. The first full-scale study of teen romance fiction, Becoming a Woman through Romance establishes the importance of the study of popular culture forms found in school for understanding the process of school materials in identity formation.

Reading the Romance

Reading the Romance PDF Author: Janice A. Radway
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807898856
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Originally published in 1984, Reading the Romance challenges popular (and often demeaning) myths about why romantic fiction, one of publishing's most lucrative categories, captivates millions of women readers. Among those who have disparaged romance reading are feminists, literary critics, and theorists of mass culture. They claim that romances enforce the woman reader's dependence on men and acceptance of the repressive ideology purveyed by popular culture. Radway questions such claims, arguing that critical attention "must shift from the text itself, taken in isolation, to the complex social event of reading." She examines that event, from the complicated business of publishing and distribution to the individual reader's engagement with the text. Radway's provocative approach combines reader-response criticism with anthropology and feminist psychology. Asking readers themselves to explore their reading motives, habits, and rewards, she conducted interviews in a midwestern town with forty-two romance readers whom she met through Dorothy Evans, a chain bookstore employee who has earned a reputation as an expert on romantic fiction. Evans defends her customers' choice of entertainment; reading romances, she tells Radway, is no more harmful than watching sports on television. "We read books so we won't cry" is the poignant explanation one woman offers for her reading habit. Indeed, Radway found that while the women she studied devote themselves to nurturing their families, these wives and mothers receive insufficient devotion or nurturance in return. In romances the women find not only escape from the demanding and often tiresome routines of their lives but also a hero who supplies the tenderness and admiring attention that they have learned not to expect. The heroines admired by Radway's group defy the expected stereotypes; they are strong, independent, and intelligent. That such characters often find themselves to be victims of male aggression and almost always resign themselves to accepting conventional roles in life has less to do, Radway argues, with the women readers' fantasies and choices than with their need to deal with a fear of masculine dominance. These romance readers resent not only the limited choices in their own lives but the patronizing atitude that men especially express toward their reading tastes. In fact, women read romances both to protest and to escape temporarily the narrowly defined role prescribed for them by a patriarchal culture. Paradoxically, the books that they read make conventional roles for women seem desirable. It is this complex relationship between culture, text, and woman reader that Radway urges feminists to address. Romance readers, she argues, should be encouraged to deliver their protests in the arena of actual social relations rather than to act them out in the solitude of the imagination. In a new introduction, Janice Radway places the book within the context of current scholarship and offers both an explanation and critique of the study's limitations.

Courting Greta

Courting Greta PDF Author: Ramsey Hootman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476711305
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Samuel Cooke knows most women wouldn’t give him a second glance even if he were the last man on earth. He’s the cripple with crutches, the nerdy computer genius every female past puberty feels compelled to mother. So when he leaves his lucrative career to teach programming to high schoolers, romance definitely isn’t on his radar. Perhaps that’s why Greta Cassamajor catches him off guard. The sarcastic gym coach with zero sense of humor is no beauty—not even on the inside. But an inexplicably kind act toward Samuel makes him realize she is interesting. Samuel is certain she won’t accept his invitation to dinner—so when she does, he’s out of his depth. All he knows is that he’ll do whatever it takes to keep her as long as he can. Pretending he’s got his class under control? Easy. Being vulnerable enough to admit why he ditched his programming career for teaching? Um, no. That would require honesty. And if there’s one thing Samuel can’t exist without, it’s the lies he tells himself. In this poignant, witty debut, Ramsey Hootman upends traditional romance tropes to weave a charming tale of perseverance, trust, and slightly conditional love.

A Kiss for Midwinter

A Kiss for Midwinter PDF Author: Courtney Milan
Publisher: Courtney Milan
ISBN: 1937248100
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
Miss Lydia Charingford is always cheerful, and never more so than at Christmas time. But no matter how hard she smiles, she can't forget the youthful mistake that could have ruined her reputation. Even though the worst of her indiscretion was kept secret, one other person knows the truth of those dark days: the sarcastic Doctor Jonas Grantham. She wants nothing to do with him...or the butterflies that take flight in her stomach every time he looks her way. Jonas Grantham has a secret, too: He's been in love with Lydia for more than a year. This winter, he's determined to conquer her dislike and win her for his own. And he has a plan to do it. If only his plans didn't so often go awry... The books in the Brothers Sinister series: ½. The Governess Affair (free prequel novella) 1. The Duchess War 1½. A Kiss for Midwinter (a companion novella to The Duchess War) 2. The Heiress Effect 3. The Countess Conspiracy 4. The Suffragette Scandal 4½. Talk Sweetly to Me

Oriental Girls Desire Romance

Oriental Girls Desire Romance PDF Author: Catherine Liu
Publisher: Kaya/Muae
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
By Catherine Liu.

Dangerous Books for Girls

Dangerous Books for Girls PDF Author: Maya Rodale
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780990635666
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Long before clinch covers and bodice rippers, romance novels had a bad reputation as the lowbrow lit of desperate housewives and hopeless spinsters. But why were these books-the escape and entertainment of choice for millions of women-singled out for scorn and shame? Dangerous Books for Girls examines the secret history of the genre's bad reputation-from the "damned mob of scribbling women" in the nineteenth century to the sexy mass-market paperbacks of the twentieth century-and shows how romance novels have inspired and empowered generations of women to dream big, refuse to settle, and believe they're worth it. For every woman who has ever hidden the cover of a romance-and every woman who has been curious about those "Fabio books"-Dangerous Books For Girls shows why there's no room for guilt when reading for pleasure.

Women and Romance

Women and Romance PDF Author: Laurie Langbauer
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501723065
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
No detailed description available for "Women and Romance".

Women and Romance

Women and Romance PDF Author: Susan Ostrov Weisser
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 081479355X
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 493

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Book Description
Weisser (English, Adelphi U.) writes that her anthology is "for anyone who is interested in understanding the conflicted but powerful female urge to experience the pleasure and endure the pain of romantic love." In particular, she explores the collision of pervasive media images of romance with feminist values of independence and self-assertion. Several dozen historic and contemporary works of criticism, personal essays, and letters, by feminist and anti-feminist thinkers, consider changing images of romantic love and whether romance, fundamentally, weakens or empowers women. Contributors include Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charlotte Bronte, Karen Horney, Simone de Beauvoir, Rita Mae Brown, bell hooks, Vivian Gornick, and Carolyn Heilbrun. c. Book News Inc.

Unmasked Heart

Unmasked Heart PDF Author: Vanessa Riley
Publisher: Gallium Optronics
ISBN: 9780990743767
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
Shy, nearsighted caregiver, Gaia Telfair always wondered why her father treated her a little differently from her siblings, but she never guessed she couldn't claim his love because of a family secret, her illicit birth. With everything she knows to be true evaporating before her spectacles, can the mulatto passing for white survive being exposed and shunned by a powerful duke who has taken an interest in her? Ex-warrior, William St. Landon, the Duke of Cheshire, will do anything to protect his mute daughter from his late wife's scandals. With a blackmailer at large, hiding in a small village near the cliffs of Devonshire seems the best option, particularly since he can gain help from the talented Miss Telfair, who has the ability to help children speak. If only he could do a better job at shielding his heart from the young lady, whose honest hazel eyes see through his jests as her tender lips challenge his desire to remain a single man.